


house of dreams

by heavyliesthecrown



Series: book of love [2]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Domestic, Domestic Bughead, F/M, Fluff, Fluffy Angst, Future Fic, Parenthood, jughead worries about being a dad even though he's good at it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-12
Packaged: 2019-02-27 09:15:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13245156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavyliesthecrown/pseuds/heavyliesthecrown
Summary: He didn't plan on the Barbie Dream House being more than three-feet wide. He didn't plan on that toy bringing his insecurities about fatherhood to the forefront on Christmas Eve, either.Or, when the father has sinned, how far does the son have to go to make sure, without a shadow of a doubt, that those sins will never become his own?





	1. Chapter 1

Amazon has failed him. He receives the bad news, timestamped 9:07 a.m., and he knows what it says before even opening the email. But he does, and there are the words he really doesn’t want to see staring back at him on Christmas Eve.

 _We_ _’_ _re sorry, but your order has been delayed_.

Many things run through his mind, the first of which is that as a loyal Amazon Prime customer, which he pays ninety-nine hard earned American Dollars to call himself every year, he does not deserve this. The second, third, and fourth are a series of thoughts all of the _why me and why today_ variety.

He snaps a picture of the email and quickly texts it to Betty, who trooper that she is, was up at 6:30 with groan and a smile because Carol’s _“_ _got a stomach bug and would_ _Betty mind terribly if she covered_ _her interview scheduled for nine a.m._ _?_ _”_ He’s highly suspicious that stomach bug, holiday season or not, is always code for _outrageously and royally hungover_ , but he doesn’t think that’s a particularly helpful thing to throw out there when Betty is tiptoeing around the bedroom blindly in the dark looking for her misplaced heels and trying not to wake him.

It takes her a few minutes to respond but ever the optimist, she tells him to not worry because there’s enough gifts coming Juliet’s way and that she probably won’t even notice that one’s missing. Then, there’s a string of smiley-face emojis, faces contorted into different expressions, and one of what he thinks is a crying cat.

Jughead does not do emojis. But he likes when he gets them from Betty because he can almost picture her face reacting the way the pictures do, green eyes wide with surprise, lips twisted in a grin.

Pocketing his phone, he walks over to the room with a lopsided wooden sign bearing the letters _Juju_ in painted pink, verified evidence of the fact that the Jones family destiny has been and will always be to shoulder some stupid nickname at some point or other, with a high probability of it beginning with the letter _J_.

It’s almost eleven on Christmas Eve but she’s still sleeping soundly, flat on her stomach, face pressed into her pillow, blankets half kicked off the bed. For a moment, he’s reminded of his sister and of the days before she was safe in Toledo and he was in danger in Riverdale, admittedly danger mostly of his own making. He remembers how his mother would rush out the door, one foot on the worn welcome mat and head turned back to him, almost in an afterthought, her voice tired but stern in her warning to _take care of Jellybean_ and to not let anything happen to her.

JB had been his to protect then and Juliet is his to protect now. But despite the decades of time passed, the knowledge that he’s _responsible_ for any and all things that should happen to that little individual doesn’t fill him with any less of a sense of monumental, almost terrifying apprehension.

He watches the rise and fall of her body, an almost imperceptible movement but one he’s long learned to track under a watchful eye. There’s an eerie sense of calm, of comfort, that comes from the steadiness of her slow breathing, and he thinks that he’d be content to watch it forever. But Juliet is a light sleeper, so he shuts the door with as soft a click as he can manage, and resigns himself to writing until she wakes up.

When he flips his laptop back open, the offending email glares back at him mockingly, along with something from his agent which he actively tries to ignore, and he lets out a frustrated sigh. It hadn’t been as if he had done this last minute, either – the thing had been bought weeks ago, backordered, but also ‘ _guaranteed in time by Christmas or your money back_.’

 _Damn straight he’ll be getting his money back_ , he thinks.

He wonders if there’s some sort of cosmic significance to the fact that of all the things that could’ve possibly not arrived in time, this toy – the _Dream House_ – had to be the one that didn’t.

* * *

 

He hears the footsteps padding towards him before he sees her and when he does, her dark hair hangs messily around her grumpy face _._ Juliet has never been a kid that wakes with the sun, happy to greet each morning with a smile and a _can’t-wait-to-see-what-the-day-holds_ attitude, and he’s unsurprised that even the day before Christmas does nothing to alter that reality. 

“Where’s mom?” she asks, one little fist rubbing at her eyes.

“It’s nice to see you, too,” he says wryly.  “Mom’s at work but she’ll be back soon.”

He pushes his computer onto the couch in an invitation for her to crawl up onto his lap, and when her feeble attempt to do so leaves her with a growing frown on her face, he reaches his hands under her arms and pulls her to him. He can’t even blame her for her morning grumpiness – he grudgingly takes full credit for it because he knows she’s gotten the whole routine entirely, though very unintentionally, from him.

Sometimes, the science behind _kids_ still baffles him. Not in the birds and the bees sense, because he’s pretty clear on that front at this point, but in the way that they can inherit so much without having been taught a thing about what they’re inheriting.

“Still tired?” he asks quietly, to which he receives a half-groan, half- _humphf_ in response. That’s what he means by kids and science –he knows that is exactly the response he gives when he shuffles into the kitchen on Saturday morning, half-asleep and not knowing what day or year it is, and is greeted by a bright eyed and bushy ponytail-wearing blonde, handing him a cup of coffee, asking him how he slept, and what he wants to do this weekend all within the span of one breath.

“Is there food?” he hears her mumble against his shirt.

“Pancakes? They’re good.”

“Who made them?” Fact – his kid is not a fan of his doughy pancakes and will not go within ten feet of them. He doesn’t think they’re that bad but no one else seems to agree with him.

“Mom did, before she left this morning.” 

He had rolled over a few hours after Betty left and landed face-first into a note on her pillow. Eyes half open, he made out the words _pancakes in the oven! Make sure you save some for Juliet_ , and a small heart in the corner for good measure. He knows exactly why today of all days Betty has _pancakes-in-the-oven-exclamation-point_ because Christmas Eve had been one of the only days Alice Cooper wouldn’t chide and tut that _“carbs for breakfast make you bloated, honey,”_ and Betty would be damned if Juliet didn’t get to experience that same joy, too.

“Okay,” Juliet says eventually. “Pancakes are good.”

 _That’s my girl_ , he thinks.

He leans forward to carry her over to one of the barstools, but stops when he hears a muffled _“wait,”_ against his chest. Juliet’s eyes are still fluttering in the vague in between of open and closed, her arms are coiled around his neck with a kind of dead heaviness in betrayal of the fact she’s still not entirely with it, even in the face of impending pancakes.

He lets himself fall back against the couch, relishing the feeling of her weight against him. He remembers the way her entire head had once fit easily into the palm of his hand, how the idea of holding her then had filled him with something beyond simple nervousness, because he had been so sure that if he pinched or swaddled even a fraction too hard, she’d crumble into a million pieces, like a china doll hitting the floor, irreparable and irreplaceable.

They’ve been told that she’s small for her age, which he’s sure is something of an impossibility given the amount she eats every day. But he still thinks how much he likes her at this size, how nice the soft weight of her slumped against him feels - heavy in a comfortable way, heavy in a way that inspires a little less fear in him than her newborn state had. 

He grins at her when she eventually lifts her head from his chest and bites back a laugh when she swats his hand away when he tries to brush her matted hair from her forehead. But her eyes are more alert now and a little less bleary as they look towards the kitchen, which he reads as _food now_ , so he carries her to one of the barstools.

“Hey,” he commands sternly when he sees her tucking her calves under her thighs, the telltale sign that she’s about to stand on the chair and peer over at the stacks of pancakes. “What did I say about that?” 

“Sorry,” she says sheepishly, immediately crouching low from being caught. “I forgot.”

He doesn’t know how that’s possible because her standing and falling off the barstool had been how she’d wound up with three stitches under her ear. But then again, she had just been wailing through the whole thing - _he_ had the stomach-churning task of cleaning up the mess because the sight of Juliet’s blood pooled on the kitchen floor had almost made Betty faint, so he’s not forgetting that day anytime soon.

But it’s a story that Juliet doesn’t like retold or rehashed because it embarrasses her, and he leaves the admonishment at that.

“So, Christmas is tomorrow,” he poses casually, going for the easy conversation route. “What do you want Santa to bring you?”

“Dad, Santa’s not real.” She looks glum, almost heartbroken, at the admission but full of conviction.

“What? Who told you that?” He racks his head quickly, thinking if he’s said anything recently that might’ve made him the offending but very unwitting dispeller of the great pot-bellied mystique.

“Charlie from school.”

"Well, Charlie from school is wrong,” he tells her plainly. “Of course Santa is real.” The words as he says them do _not_ , but he hopes that doesn’t convey. 

“But we don’t have a chimney so how does he come into here?”

“You know the fireplace in the lobby?” He waits for her to nod along before he continues. “That’s the one Santa uses.”

“But then how do the presents get under the tree?”

“Well, uh,” he mumbles, trying to buy himself a few extra seconds. “He knocks on the door.”

“Really?” 

“Really.” She seems to consider this seriously while swirling a pancake bite in her ocean of syrup and for a moment he thinks he’s off the hook.

“How come I never heard him?” _Damn it._  

“Uh,” he begins again, hand involuntarily coming up to scratch behind his neck. “Because kids don’t have ears big enough to hear Santa’s knock.”

“So you met Santa?” _Oh, Jesus Christ_.

“Well, I would’ve,” he says slowly, telling himself to think through each word this time. “But I’ve slept through it every time he’s knocked. You know how hard it is to wake me up.” That at least is not a lie. He sleeps like the dead – Juliet has come into their room banging pots and pans before, literally, and the most he’s done is grunt and roll over.

He could’ve come up with a better story, he thinks, but she seems to buy it just the same, her focus turned back on her plate. At least he has that on his side – a Jones is never not distracted by food.

“Are there more pancakes?” she asks through her last bite. Case in point.

“Yeah. Do you want one or two?”

Her lip twists in thought. “Two and a half.” He wants to doubt her because she’s already had three and is about the size of a small houseplant, but she’s also never been wrong about how much she can put away.

“Dad?”

“Hmm?” 

“Why does Mom have to work on Christmas Eve?”

“Because,” he says, ripping off half of the third pancake for himself. “A lady named Carol got sick and Mom thought it would be nice to help her out. So remember to thank her for the pancakes later, because she got up early to make them just for you.”

And probably him, too, but he sees no point in sullying a child’s heartfelt thank you with that admission.

“Okay. Is Carol really sick?”

Ha. Smart kid.

 _His_ kid.

“I don’t know, Ju. Do you think she’s not sick?”

She shrugs. “Leah said one time her mom said she was sick but they were in Cora Cora.”

He takes a minute to digest the information. He thinks she means _Bora Bora_ , but he can’t be sure – Cora Cora might be Leah’s version of Never Never Land for all he knows. He’s also not sure he remembers a _Leah_ either.

“Well,” he responds through a bite of pancake. “I’m not sure this is exactly like that. But it could be. Have you ever said you were sick to not go to school?”

The way her eyes immediately slink off of his tells him _yes_ , she absolutely has, and that she’s grappling with whether or not she should lie about it now.

 _Betty’s_ kid.

“Maybe,” she says eventually, eyes focused on her lap.

He files that tidbit of information away in the _to be addressed later and only with the mother present_ pile in his mind. It isn’t that he necessarily cares she might be training to give Ferris Bueller a run for his money, because one, she’d probably get that from him anyhow, and two, because he’s of the school of thought that playing hooky should be encouraged every now and then. But he’s also played the _I’m-sick-cough-cough_ card to avoid bullying before, and he wants to make sure it’s nothing like that, either.

“Hey, Dad?” she asks, voice small. “Are you mad at me?” 

“What? No,” he answers quickly, and because he feels the need to emphasize the point, he bops her gently on the nose. “Of course I’m not mad at you.” He watches her smile return and it makes him smile, too.

“Dad?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you think Mom’s met Santa?” He hides his laugh behind another bite of pancake, chewing thoughtfully and swallowing before answering. 

“That’s a good question, Juju. Why don’t you ask her when she comes home?”

 

* * *

 

Juliet doesn’t get a chance to because by the time Betty gets home, she’s already soundly napping, her head pillowed on his lap and one arm curled around the cat. She’s also drooling on him and even though it’s a little gross because he can feel it slowly but surely seeping through his jeans, he doesn’t have the heart to wipe it off in case he wakes her.

The amount of sleep this kid needs is honestly concerning and even though the doctors and WebMD have assured him it’s all _fine_ , he’s still doubtful sometimes. 

He looks up from the same page he’s been staring at and not reading a word of for the last thirty minutes when the keys twist in the lock, and he watches Betty and her snow-covered ponytail swish into the apartment, the early wake-up call apparently having done nothing to slow her or her Christmas spirit down.

“Hey!” she greets brightly, and immediately makes a sheepish face, mouth in a round _‘o,’_ when she notices the slumbering child. _Sorry_ , she mouths. He shakes his head in response trying to convey something along the lines of _it_ _’_ _s all good_ , shoos the cat off the couch, and carries Juliet to her room to nap in peace.

Betty has her several layers of coats and scarves hung up by the time he quietly closes the door to Juliet’s room. “Hey,” he says, greeting half muffled through a quick kiss. He’s been more or less kissing the same girl for half his life now, save for a few mistakes that he’s still Very Sorry for, but he still feels that same tug at his stomach every time he does. He hopes it never goes away. “How was the interview?”

Betty shrugs and starts moving the grocery bags into the kitchen. “It was fine. I don’t think my follow-up questions were great but all the quotes Carol needs should be there. I got stuff for sandwiches,” she says and with that abrupt change, he knows not to push the subject any further. She’s been working overtime, covering for everyone who has last minute shopping to do or a friend’s-brother’s-niece’s-third-cousin’s Christmas play to attend. He knows that she’s exhausted and he figures she’s not interested in getting into all of that right now.

“Hey,” he says, his hand stilling hers as she pulls cold cuts from the paper bags. “I’ll do it. Sit down. Relax. Loosen the ponytail a bit.” He gives it a playful flick for emphasis.

Betty sits down at the counter across from him and looks at him with tired eyes as he unpacks what looks like the ingredients for sugar cookies. “For Arch and Veronica’s,” she says by way of explanation. They’re having dinner with them tomorrow and even though Veronica has hired actual caterers and cooks for this thing – because Veronica does _not-slash-cannot_  cook when there’s an easy solution money can buy – Betty showing up empty handed would be as good as her showing up naked. That and the fact that Archie has been texting them both about the goddamn sugar cookies every day for a good eleven days now, something about how it’s just “not Christmas” without them and that it’s been the “greatest of traditions” since they were five.

He’s not disagreeing with the cookie gobbler, but eleven days is excessive even by his standards.

“I have enough for extras for us,” she comments as he sets the baking ingredients to the side. “We can decorate them once she’s up.”

“Oh. Sure, sounds like fun.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “What?”

“What?”

“We don’t have to do that if you don’t want to.”

“No, I do,” he says quickly, tearing open the package indicating _ham_ in messy deli scribble when her indecisive finger finally lands on what it wants. “I was just going to hit up a few toy stores later, that’s all.”

“Jug,” Betty sighs, and he holds up the hand that isn’t covered in breadcrumbs. 

“Just a few. Two hours tops.”

“You really don’t need to,” she says. “She literally has _so_ much stuff coming her way. And it’s not like it’s not coming at all. It’s just delayed, right?”

“It’s just delayed,” he confirms. “But I just –” he trails off because he doesn’t know what comes after that. All he knows is that this whole situation has him feeling unsettled and if there’s a way he can fix it easily he feels obligated to at least try.

“Do you even know how big a Barbie Dream House is?” She holds out to him the apple she’s been working on and he twists his head and tries to match up his bite with the line of her perfectly even ones. A drop of juice trickles its way down the curve of her hand and he reaches out a finger to catch it before it ruins the sleeve of her white sweater.

“How big could it really be?” he says after giving it a moment of thought. “It’s just a doll house.”

“Yeah, but she’s kind of spoiled and a bitch so it’s a pretty big house.” This earns her a laugh. Betty rarely swears and he always enjoys it when she does; there’s something unnaturally funny about it all.

“Who do you think is more spoiled?” he muses. “Barbie or Veronica?”

“I’m not answering that.”

“So you think Veronica, too?” She doesn’t say anything, but the way the corners of her mouth tug upward tells him all he needs to know.

“Jug, I’m obviously not going to stop you if you want to do this. But it’s really, _really_ okay if you don’t.” She reaches her hand across the counter to rest on his and he lets himself relish in the feeling of her fingertips pressing against the top of his hand, still a little cold from the outside, but always, always comforting.

“Some kid told Juliet Santa’s not real,” he reveals quietly, and he watches her eyes grow wide with the information. Then, the questions come tumbling out of her mouth all in one quick breath.

“What? Who? _Why?”_

“Some kid named Charlie. I don’t know why. Probably because he’s a little shit.” Betty purses her lips and he knows she’s fighting between telling him not to call some kid they don’t know names, and wholeheartedly agreeing with him.

“What did you say to her?” 

“I said Charlie is a liar. And then I made it worse.” She raises one eyebrow at him, her indication of _go on, can_ _’_ _t wait to hear this_. “I said Santa comes through the fireplace in the lobby, knocks on our door to deliver gifts, but that she can’t hear the knocking because her ears aren’t big enough yet. Oh, and even though he knocks, I’ve apparently never met him before because I’ve slept through it all these years.”

She looks at him as if he’s suddenly grown a second head, and then she laughs. She laughs one of those big, hearty laughs her mother would disapprove of because it’s _“not ladylike, Betty,”_ one that has her slapping at the countertop and wheezing for breath. It’s funny, he thinks, but he didn’t think it was _that_ funny.

“I was ambushed by questions,” he defends lamely, as if that makes up for his story with plot-holes so big a truck could drive right through them. He’s an insult to his craft.

She tries her best to stop laughing then, even though he can tell she’s clearly not done finding his miserable story funny yet. “Don’t worry,” she says eventually. “She probably won’t even remember it.”

He snorts. “It’s a pretty unforgettable story, Betts.” The toaster pops and he grabs the bread gingerly between two fingers, caps off the sandwiches, and comes around the counter to sit beside her. “What would you have said?” He’s genuinely curious because even though hours have passed, he still can’t think of a better story than the one he told. Clearly, he should just stick to mystery-noir and the like, because kids’ storytelling is obviously not going to earn him a quick buck anytime soon.

Betty finishes her bite looking thoughtful and shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “I probably would’ve just said Santa’s magical or something and that’s why he can come into the house without knocking.”

There it is. A simple, straightforward solution he just wasn’t able to land on. He frowns at his plate, sandwich looking suddenly unappetizing and picks at a piece of crust. Out of the corner of his eye he’s just able to spot the outline of the antique Underwood typewriter he’s cherished and dutifully polished all these years, and he realizes then that’s part of what has him feeling uneasy about this whole day.

He wants Juliet to experience that same _there’_ _s something amazing in_ _here and it_ _’_ _s_ _just_ _for me_ feeling he got when Betty had placed that box in hands, and not the sinking _oh crap, my dad filled gift boxes with drugs for the tots_ feeling he got hours later. He doesn’t want his kid to wake up in the morning and feel anything short of wonder and excitement, and he’s worried that if that this particular gift happens to be missing, she will.

“Hey,” Betty says, bumping her arm up against his. “Thanks for the sandwich.” He bumps back, because at this point they have a whole dictionary of actions that do just fine as verbal substitutes, and sometimes it’s just easier to use them. He watches as she stacks their plates in the dishwasher and as she starts rummaging around the cabinets unearthing cookie sheets and rolling pins because god forbid the wonder-woman that is his Betty Cooper stop for a moment to put her feet up, even on Christmas Eve.

“Betts,” he hears himself saying. “I just don’t want her to be disappointed, you know?”

She looks at him with narrowed eyes, her head tilted in a careful study of him as she drums a gingerbread man shaped cookie cutter on the counter rhythmically. He can tell she’s rolling around and weighing his words in her head, finding her best way to guide him, and just like that she’s suddenly taking off down the hall and into Juliet’s room.

“Here,” she calls softly, tossing something at him. He catches it before he has a chance to register what exactly is flying his direction, but he knows exactly what it is the minute it lands in his hands. “It’s snowing out.”

His old beanie, the one he had grown up in, the one that had been his second skin, has technically not been his for two years since the fateful day that Juliet lost her own hat to the wind. He had placed his on her head instead to ward off the cold and stop her crying, and with that, the ownership of the beanie had passed from father to child without so much as a word. He knows, he really does know how stupid it is, but he just can’t find another hat that feels the same, and so he had figured that was just the universe’s way of telling him that someone else needed that little piece of comfort more than he did.

“You know she’s going to ask for it,” he says, turning the beanie around in his hands. It still feels so familiar.

Betty shrugs. “I’ll tell her you asked to borrow it. She won’t mind,” she reasons, and he knows she’s right. They have a generous kid because no daughter of Betty’s would ever be otherwise. Slowly, he places the hat on his head, adjusts it so that the red button sits just over his right ear and looks at her expectantly. 

“Well?” he asks. “How do I look?” She smiles at him then and there’s a soft, almost faraway look in her eyes as she does.

“Like the guy I fell in love with when I was fifteen.”

 

* * *

 

At the toy store on Madison, there are screaming kids everywhere and he wants to leave immediately. Juliet has never really been a screamer and on the rare occasion she does, the sound makes his blood run cold and his heart race more than it does bother him. He figures it’s some kind of primordial parent-thing.

This, however - this just makes his left eye twitch.

He ambles through the throng of screaming, running children with arms akimbo, past the parents chasing after them, and straight to the aisle exuding pink. There are boxes upon boxes of what he thinks are downright creepy looking doll faces all staring back at him in a very Stepfordian way and that urge to bolt from the store and jump right back on the subway rises again. But he doesn’t, and instead he stops a harried-looking employee in her tracks.

“Hey... uh, hi,” he begins. What a great start he’s off to. “Do you know if you still have the Barbie Dream House in stock?” She gives him a short, frankly rude, laugh back in response and he feels the heat grow on his neck.

“That thing’s been gone for a good month now.” He bites back the retort that’s on the tip of his tongue, something along the lines of _well, that means you had a good month to restock it and you didn_ _’_ _t, so who_ _’_ _s really at fault here_ , and forces a smile on his face that he knows is coming out more like a grimace.

“Do you have any idea where I could find one?” He absolutely hates the look this person he doesn’t know at all is giving him right now. Like she’s judging him for having left this to the last minute. Like he’s walking around the store with a sign pinned to his back saying _“Bad Father Right Here!”_

“Look, I don’t know,” she says. “There’s a Toys ‘R’ Us downtown you could try.” She all but runs away before he can get in any follow up questions.

 

* * *

 

It’s not at the Toys ‘R’ Us downtown or the one uptown. It’s not at the two in Brooklyn and so now he’s taking three trains to Queens because the Park Slope manager’s sister _maybe_ got one there two days ago.

He knows he’s going a little nuts and he also knows that if Betty had any idea what he was doing right now, she’d tell him flatly, _Jughead Jones_ \- come home _. Come home_ right _now, you_ _’re_ _being ridiculous_. And so, he sends Betty a few deliberately vague texts saying that he’ll be home soon, don’t wait on him for dinner, and just hopes that she doesn’t press any further.

Somewhere in between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and about thirty-dollars in subway fare squandered, he starts to realize that his ill-conceived pilgrimage to almost every single toy story in the five boroughs has a bit more to do with his own demons than he really cares to admit.

He feels like he’s been a step behind this whole _you’re-a-father_ thing before Juliet had even been born.

She had been planned as much as one could plan a night of getting wine-drunk at one of Veronica’s fall-line launch parties, making out in the back of the cab on the way home like horny teenagers, and going at it on the kitchen counter. They hadn’t sat down and had A Conversation about it like he suspects a lot of other people do, and he’s always wondered if Juliet somehow knows that. Or knows that when Betty first told him about her soon-to-be presence in their lives in about seven to eight months, he had been so utterly shell-shocked by the information that he had to sit down immediately and right where he had been standing – on the floor in the no man’s land between the kitchen and the living room – for a solid hour, unable to say anything. He hopes she doesn’t know any of that because even though she hadn’t _been_ planned, it didn’t mean that he _didn_ _’t_ plan.

Because he did. He planned and planned. He’d planned on talking to his dad, to Fred Andrews and asking them exactly how the hell he was supposed to do this, and if this paralyzing fear he felt constantly was normal. He even planned on talking to _Betty’s_ dad because he figured Hal Cooper knew a thing or two about raising a pretty great daughter, even though the thought had terrified the self-preservationist in him because the last time one of Hal Cooper’s daughters wound up pregnant, it hadn’t ended well for anyone involved, _especially_ for the father buried six feet under. He planned on reading all kinds of books and doing all kinds of research, and sometimes, he’d even stay up all night planning the things he’d do with the kid that was, at the time of all his planning, no larger than a lima bean. 

Jughead knows a thing or two about not being wanted. He knows what it feels like when one’s father looks at you with such surprise because he thought you’d been home for the past two days – in the trailer with one room, no less – when you’ve really been sleeping at the library for a week. He knows about the soul-crushing dejection that stems from one’s mother saying _now_ _’_ _s_ _just_ _not a good time for you to come to Toledo,_ _honey, there_ _’_ _s simply_ _not enough space for your sister_ and _your grandmother_ _’_ _s_ _dogs in this house_.

He can reconcile, maybe even come to terms with the fact that his mother chose his sister over him when she left – JB had been a lot younger than him, and while he was the spitting image of FP, JB looked just different enough to ensure that their mother wouldn’t be filled with blind rage every time she so much as glanced at her. But for the life of him, he just can’t come to terms with the fact that he had been told to _stay put, Jughead,_ because grandma’s dogs apparently deserved the spot on the couch more than his homeless self did. He knows all about not being wanted, and therein lies the rub.

He doesn’t know what makes a kid feel wanted, and his kid _is_ ; his kid is so, _so_ wanted. He thinks he has all the basic steps down – tell her and show her you love her, spend time with her, be there when she’s scared, soothe her nightmares. And so he makes sure that he does all those things every single day. But, because he’s also been a kid before, he knows it’s not all that simple. He knows how delicate and how fragile kids can be, how easily things can be misconstrued and misinterpreted.

So, what if the thing Juliet chooses to interpret as _I-must-not-be-wanted_ is the absence of some toy she had been incessantly talking about for months on end?

He sighs, tipping his head back on the subway car. The knowledge that Betty and Juliet are home alone right now -  maybe watching a movie, maybe having dinner – but definitely without him, does nothing to quell the demons in his head. His phone vibrates in his pocket, and before flipping it over he makes a deal with himself that if it’s Betty telling him to come home, then he’ll abandon this wild goose chase and turn around at the next stop. But it isn’t.

It’s Archie. _Upwards and onwards_ he thinks as he opens up the message.

_Whatcha doing?_

_Not watching re-runs of Bachelor in Paradise like you._ He can practically see it – Veronica with a glass of Chardonnay in hand and Archie sprawled on the couch looking bored but still asking clarifying questions every now and then, because as much as Archie likes to _pretend_ he’s not interested in the show, he is. He definitely is.

_I'm not._

_It's Cake Boss._

_Some guy is making a cake that looks like a burger._

_Ah_ , he thinks. Hence the text. Archie is sweet like that sometimes. 

_I'm going to Toys R Us._

_Dude, why?_

_I thought you got all your stuff on Amazon. You wouldn't shut up about the wonders of Amazon Prime._

Sometimes, he wonders if Archie thinks before he talks. Or types.

_Well, I'm shutting up about it now. The Barbie Dream House got delayed._

_That sucks._ Doesn’t he know it. _Want help?_

He’s tempted to say yes, if only because he’s getting tired, it’s cold, and he could use some company. But he also knows that it’s Christmas Eve, and dragging his best friend out into the night to help him solve his problems while Veronica stays home with bad TV doesn’t sit right with him. 

 _Nah, I_ _’_ _m_ _good_. _Thanks though_.

 _Is it weird to you that you have a kid sometimes? Like, sometimes it_ _’_ _s still_ _weird to me_.

 _Yeah_ , he types back. _It’s_ _weird every day_.

And it is. It is weird to look at Betty’s eyes paired with his nose on one face, to pick Juliet up from school and go _yep, that one is mine_ , except here he’s claiming an actual human being and not a book or a shoe, or some other inanimate object that he calls his in his day to day life.

But, it’s also one of the greatest things he’s ever done and experienced, and so he tells Archie as much.

_But it's also weirdly great, you know?_

_Lol_ , Archie types back, and Jughead rolls his eyes. _I_ _’l_ _l take your word for it_.

The conversation peters out and Jughead figures that the commercial break must’ve ended, drawing Archie’s full attention is back to the TV. He flips through a few apps looking at nothing in particular and just as he’s about to slip his phone back in his pocket, it vibrates again.

_You better find it, Jughead. I refuse to look stupid when we give her the Jeep and it has no garage to go in._

He’s not even surprised that Veronica’s found a way to make this about herself.

In all honesty, he likes Veronica. He thinks she’s good for Archie because Archie has an ego that’s big enough all on his own and Veronica does a fine job of keeping it in check and stroking it only when necessary. She’s been nothing but the most loyal friend to Betty, and even though Betty has Archie on her short list of _people-I-can-share-anything-with_ , he thinks that Betty probably appreciates that she has someone that isn’t also _his_ best friend to turn to when he’s being less than his best self.

But Veronica is also a handful one hundred percent of the time. There are days where he’s happy to – even enjoys – dishing it right back to her, but a short response is about all he feels that he can manage right now.

_Noted._

* * *

 

He does find it. He’s one of the last few people in the store and every single employee is giving him dirty looks that he can’t even blame them for, because all he wants is to get out of here and go home, too. He walks quickly, already familiar with the layout of this particular hell on earth since it isn’t any different from the last four he’s been to tonight, and when he finally sees it, he thinks for a moment that it’s some kind of mirage.

But just for a moment, because there’s a kid near him that just might be moving slowly towards it and rather than take any chances, he overtakes her with three long strides – leaps, really – and loudly slaps his hand on the box as if to say _mine_ _-_ _I got here first, and according to the laws of finders-keepers, this is_ mine.

He’s wrong, of course, and he feels just like the crazy person he knows this child thinks he is when she reaches past him and grabs for one of the boxed dolls on the shelf instead. The 80s-themed doll, he recognizes, because Juliet has the same one and he’s accidentally stepped on it's face before.

When he’s free of her judging eyes, he looks down at his somewhat ill-gotten gains and all he can think is that Betty was both right and wrong about two things. One, Barbie is most likely spoiled and a bitch because her vomit-inducing hot pink house is ridiculously massive. Two, there is no way on earth Juliet would’ve not noticed this particular gift missing from under the tree, or rather, _beside_ the tree because there’s no way this thing will fit _under_ the tree without it toppling over.

But, he doesn’t have to worry about any of that anymore because he _found it_ and now he’s feeling downright triumphant as he carries the box over to the checkout lines, maybe even a little bit smug as he looks around at the other frazzled shoppers and thinks _yeah, I’m done and my kid is going to love this, but_ very _best of luck deciding between the orange or the yellow Nerf Gun!_

But because his karmic retribution is about the only thing about him that’s quicker than his metabolism, he’s brought back to planet earth when the credit card reader blares out an embarrassingly loud error sound.

Before he can even pull the card from the reader and try again, because he’s not destitute and _can_ actually afford this, thank you very much, the cashier in all her long-nailed glory reaches over the register and yanks it from the reader for him, entirely ignoring his outstretched hand.

He knows what’s coming even before she gives the card a once over and does the predictable a double-take as she brings it closer to her face. Even though he’s willing her in his head _let it go, just let it go_ , she doesn’t - because no one ever does - and she asks him one of his least favorite questions of all time because it invariably leads to one of his least favorite conversation topics of all time.

“Can I see some ID?”

There is a scowl of the grandest proportions on his face as he hands over his license and watches as she matches up all twenty-two letters and three roman numerals with each other. He’s fully aware that his WASP-y sounding name and his general hipster-hobo-homeless aesthetic aren’t exactly a one-to-one, but he also doesn’t think that he gives off a vibe that actively screams _thief!_ or _robber!_

“How do you pronounce this?” she asks.

He makes a feeble attempt to reach for the cards again but he can tell she’s clearly going to hold them hostage until he responds, so he mumbles quietly, “Forsythe.”

“What?”

“ _For-sythe_.” It’s like he’s eight at homeroom roll call again, his whole class giggling moronically as he mutters to the teacher _“it’s For-sythe, not For-syth-ee. You know what? It_ _’_ _s Jughead.”_  

“Sounds like a tree. What kind of name is that?”

“One I don’t like to talk about,” he says shortly. “Look, I really need to get home so if you could just-“ Any good will he’s earned instantly vanishes as she slides the cards back to him, stony-faced, and flicks a pen his way to sign on the dotted line.

And, because he’s apparently dug himself into a bigger hole than he though, she also tells him “sorry, we don’t have bags big enough for that,” even though he’s sure he can see a whole stack of them right at her feet. He’s about to point it out, too, but she slaps an unsightly Toys ‘R’ Us sticker right over the Barbie logo, pushes the box towards him, and tells him most insincerely to have a Merry Christmas.

Jughead sighs, but he figures he kind of deserves it. Karma, and all that.

 

* * *

 

It takes him an hour and a half to get home, something about the snow causing delays even though the subway is _underground_ , and it takes him another ten minutes just to carry the damn thing the stairs.

Betty laughs when he walks through the door, presumably because the box is covering his entire face, and even though he’s freezing and starving and his arms feel like they’re about to right fall off, he’s so grateful for the sound. It means that Betty’s not mad at him and honestly, he knows that she has every right to be since it’s well past midnight and he’s undeniably abused the “I’ll be back soon,” text. 

Jughead kicks the door shut behind him, all but drops the box on the floor, and leans over the kitchen counter to stretch out his back.

“Just a few stores, huh?” he hears her ask, and for a moment he thinks that he may have been wrong and that he’s absolutely still on the hook for leaving on Christmas Eve – _two hours tops, honey_ – and barging home on Christmas Day. But when he looks up at her, she’s smiling at him and there’s a look of something else on her face. Maybe pride? He can’t tell for sure, but he thinks that’s what it might be.

He watches as Betty untangles herself from the piles of blankets on the couch and pads over to him in all her reindeer pajama glory, pajamas he had put a quick moratorium on for himself because he will play the matching Christmas pajama game with absolutely no one, not even Betty Cooper. She starts gently rubbing circles on his back, and the way the knots unloosen under her touch is probably the closest thing to heaven he’s felt in a while.

“I can wrap it,” he offers, knowing exactly where her mind has wandered off to, her head tipping in one direction and then the other as she studies the box in front of them. “You don’t have to do anything, you've wrapped everything else.”

She gives him a _look_ then, and he’s impressed that she can look at him with both challenge and sheer doubtfulness in just one glance. “Or you can do it because I wrap things like a child,” he concedes.

She laughs and gives his back a loving pat. “Not like a child,” she corrects. “I like the way you wrap things, it’s very... unique.”

“Which I believe is a euphemism for ‘like a child,’” he says, reaching the roll of wrapping paper they’ve hidden on the top shelf of the coat closet and away from prying eyes. 

She wordlessly thanks him as he passes her the paper dotted with dancing Santa’s and gingerbread men, and gestures to the counter. “Juliet made you a cookie.”

He peeks over at the paper plate with a lone sugar cookie man with black frosting for hair and a wobbly blue line that he thinks is supposed to be a smile but could also be a nose. Objectively, it’s a pretty ugly cookie and it looks nothing like the smiling snowmen with scarves in the clear Tupperware that Betty has set aside. But subjectively, he thinks it’s also one of the most beautiful things he’s ever seen. He touches the dried icing lightly, thinking about the kid he knows tried so hard to make this perfect for him and he feels that familiar tug at his heart, that same tug that comes every time she proudly runs up to him with a crayon-filled page of scribbles and says “ _here, Dad! I made this for you_.” If there were a way he could save this beautiful ugly cookie forever, he would, but he also knows that if it’s not gone by the time Juliet wakes up, she’ll think that he didn’t like it. He lets his eyes linger over it, saving as many of the unsteady lines and dots in his memory as possible, and then snaps off an arm.

“These are good, Betts,” he compliments, sitting down next to her on the floor and savoring the sickly sweetness of blue icing. Her thanks is a simple smile at him, a little tired but heartfelt, sincere. 

When he brushes off the last of the cookie crumbs from his hands, Betty hands him a roll of tape and scissors. This has been their near-nightly routine for two-weeks now – her, lips between teeth trying to find the most geometrically beautiful way to wrap a cumbersome gift, him, cut pieces of scotch tape on all five fingers. 

“Regale me with tales while I wrap?”

He grins. “Hey, that almost rhymes.”

“And they say you’re the wordsmith.” 

“I got carded again,” he offers because even though he hates these stories, he knows she loves them.

“Oh yeah? What happened this time, Forsythe?”

“Well, let me tell you, _Elizabeth_ ,” he throws back. “I was minding my own business, waiting to pay for my purchase like the good, non-thieving, law-abiding citizen that I am, when out of nowhere the checkout woman decided to badger me and badger me about how I have the dumbest name she’s ever heard of.”

“Really?”

“No, I pissed her off and she didn’t give me a bag.” Her response is something between a laugh and a snort, which he takes to mean as _serves-you-right_ , but her eyes are kind.

“Maybe she just thought that _Forsythe Pendleton_ probably already had five Barbie Dream Houses to his name and just couldn’t for the life of her figure out why he needed a sixth at midnight on Christmas Eve.”

“Please. Someone like Forsythe Pendleton _the third_ would probably have ten.”

She laughs, though he’s not sure if it’s because the thought of him surrounded by ten pink monstrosity-mansions is about as uncanny a thought as one could ever conjure up, or if it’s because hearing his given name come out of his own mouth is always funny, albeit a little jarring, because he just _hates it so much_.

Their vows had been a pretty disastrous affair. But in his defense, she had stumbled over her own name too, the ‘ _Elizabeth_ _’_ part coming out in stuttered syllables and almost like a question. They had both ended up doubled-over in laughter by the whole _“I now pronounce you”_ line because really, who were Forsythe and Elizabeth and what the hell were they doing at the wedding of Jughead and Betty. 

He still thinks that the job they did on their vows was nowhere near as bad as the one Veronica did on hers, when she proudly declared in front of a guest list of three hundred that she, Veronica Lodge would take _Archiekins-I-mean-Archibald_ Andrews for her lawfully wedded husband, for better or worse, in sickness and health till death do them part.

It’s his favorite home video, probably even surpassing the one of Juliet’s first steps because, well, schadenfreude. _Probably_ , though, not definitely.

He watches Betty wrap for a few minutes, marveling at the way her hands deftly crease and fold. His plan had been to just cut off pieces of paper and more or less tape them on as he saw fit, and he’s glad that Betty’s taken point here because she’s making the box look just like the one he had been itching to open, the one that had contained his treasured typewriter. 

She works quietly, reaching over for a piece of tape every so often and catching his gaze when she does. He knows she’s waiting for him to take the lead because she’s not going to push this particular subject without his consent, so he kicks it off with a roundabout question that he knows will eventually get them there.

“How was your night?”

“It was fine,” she says, the caution in her voice evident. “Archie called about the cookies again and I told him if he brought it up one more time they’d be staying home tomorrow night.” She pauses then and he can feel her weighing the pros and cons of her next sentence in her head. “He also wanted to check and make sure you actually didn’t need any help tonight. I said that I thought this was something you needed to do alone.”

It’s her delicate, no-pressure way of asking if he wants to talk about why exactly he felt the need to chase down the toy to the four corners of the universe – or at least, New York – to which he can either respond with _“Yeah, thanks, I didn’t feel like dragging Archie out and having to hear about it all of tomorrow from Ronnie,”_ meaning _no_ , he doesn’t want to talk about it and she’d leave it at that. Or, he can man-up and tell her the truth, and he thinks he owes her that much.

“It wasn’t just about the doll house.”

“No,” she encourages gently. “I didn’t think it was.”

It’s difficult for him to find the words, he’s realizing, because he doesn’t want her to think that any of what he’s feeling is her fault, and that’s a hard line to stride when the thing he’s talking about is Juliet, because Betty, by nature, will always be part and parcel of that conversation.

He runs his non-tape hand through his hair and sighs. “I’m not saying it to be mean or spiteful, but my dad...” he trails off, coming to terms with the thought, with the words, because he feels like it’s such a sacrilege to even think this, let alone voice it out loud. “Betty, my dad was just not a great dad.

And it’s the truth, he thinks mournfully. He loves his father because his father is his father, and FP had been there when it really mattered – he had stepped in when the going got rough with the Serpents and dragged him out like a puppy by the scruff, he had borne the brunt of the mess that was Jason Blossom’s murder and kept him more or less alive.

But those are also things that any parent worth his salt would do, he thinks. These are things that _he_ would never even have to think about doing in the first place because letting Juliet get even within a sniff’s direction of something like the Serpents is simply out of the question; it’s something that would only happen quite literally over his dead body. And beyond those few examples his father has given him to work off of, and an errant motorcycle ride every now and then, which he’s frankly not looking to replicate with Juliet at this stage of her life, he doesn’t really have any great examples of how to be his kid’s dad.

Betty reaches over and plucks a piece of tape from his finger, her lips pursed in quiet contemplation. “You think I’m extrapolating and being dramatic,” he concludes.

“No, no!” she says quickly with a violent shake of her head, ponytail whipping back and forth. “I don’t. Jug, I get the whole sins of the father thing – it’s not like I’m looking to become my mother anytime soon.” He lets out an involuntary snort at this – they’ve gotten better over the years, and especially in the Juliet ones – but at the end of the day, it’s simple, he still doesn’t like Alice Cooper and Alice Cooper still doesn’t like him.

“I just...” Betty continues, running her fingers over the box’s edge and creating a sharp crease in the wrapping paper. “I think it’s all a little unfounded.” 

He frowns. “Meaning?” 

“Meaning,” she says, affording his upset face a slight laugh. “That I don’t think I’ve seen anything from you that suggests you are your father’s son. Except maybe a mutual love of the flannel shirt. I mean, your dad just doesn’t seem like the type that would scour all of New York in search of this one, admittedly giant, toy. But you are, because you did.”

 _Drugs for kids_ , Jughead thinks. _I thought he had drugs for kids_.

She smiles at him then, leaning her shoulder against the box. “You know, there was this guy who once said to me when I was worried about turning into my crazy mother, that we’re not our parents. We’re not our families.” He returns her smile with a smirk of his own, easily picking up what she’s putting down, but he decides to play along just for the hell of it.

“Yeah?” he banters back. “Sounds like a smart guy. The smartest. Super insightful. I bet he’s doing great things now.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Betty says as seriously and with as straight a face as she can manage. “He was a bit of a smart-ass. And he used to tell me that he was weird. That he was a weirdo. He might be doing some weird freak show thing in Vegas right now for all I know.”

She’s looking at him with one of the biggest smiles he’s seen on her face in a while, daring him to break first. And, because _that_ smile will never not do things to his head and his heart, he does. And then she does. 

Her laugh is quiet, a learned habit by this point because while Juliet may have inherited his propensity to sleep the day away, she’s also inherited her mother’s tendency to wake at the drop of a nail. But the low decibel aside, her laugh is still the same warm, high-pitched sound he thinks he’d be able to pick out in any crowd, the same laugh that fills him with a deep sense of calm, even if it may sometimes be at his expense because it simply means that Betty is happy, that she’s _okay_ , and that thought will never not leave him feeling at least a little bit lighter, too.

He’s still smiling at her as her laughter subsides and as her shoulders stop shaking. “That guy, that weirdo,” she continues, folding down the final corner of the dancing Santa paper. “He _is_ doing some pretty great things now. He’s publishing a book that he’s worked on for more than a decade. He’s has this amazing daughter who thinks he’s the best dad in the world because there are about thirty drawings on his fridge that all say so. And he has a wife that pretty much agrees with that kid and all the stuff on the fridge.”

He reaches over to her with his scotch-tape free hand and brushes his thumb over her cold cheekbone, because he can’t not when she says things like that. “Sounds like a pretty incredible wife,” he says softly. “The best there is.”

He feels the heat rise on her skin under his own, and that alone instills a great sense of satisfaction in him, that his words still have that power over her, that whatever proverbial lost magic that comes with years of togetherness hasn’t seem to be cast down on them yet.

“I don’t know about that,” she says eventually, the coy wrapping around her voice. “He did leave her all alone on Christmas Eve to wander the streets of New York by himself.”

She’s teasing, he can tell, but he also thinks that this merits a real apology. “I _am_ sorry I wasn’t here tonight,” he says through a sigh. “I should’ve been.”

She’s on all fours and crawling towards him now with that _look_ on her face, the same look that led to the unexpected and interesting situation named Juliet Jones, and even though she’s wearing Christmas pajamas and a henley from her River Vixens days, the one with the hole in the back of the neck, she may as well be crawling towards in in lingerie.

“You _can_ make it up to me,” she whispers right into his ear and the feeling of her hot breath sticky against his skin is enough to send a verified shockwave to the base of his spine, still aching from a full day’s worth of kid-related activities.

But she’s smelling like flowers and sugar cookies and a little like Juliet’s baby shampoo all at once, and the fact of the matter is that he still wants this girl as much as he did when he was sixteen, if not more. In one quick motion, his back be damned, he has her in his arms and over his shoulder, and she’s shrieking and laughing loudly despite the sleeping child as he carries her to their room and lays her down gently on the bed. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thinks that she must have carefully remade it after he left this afternoon, since each throw pillow in its rightful place and he knows for a fact he didn’t leave them that way this morning. 

He settles himself on top of her, muttering something about how he’s going to show her _exactly_ how he’s going to make it up to her, but because even though he sometimes still feels sixteen, he physically isn’t anymore, he winces and rubs absently at his arm, still sore and smarting from his monstrous trek home.

Below him, Betty rolls her eyes. “Oh, come on, old man,” she jokes, poking at him. “I know I ate a lot of cookies but I’m not that heavy.”

“It’s not you,” he counters quickly because that’s something he never wants her to think about herself, ever, even if she’s joking. “it’s just... Jesus, Betts, that toy was so damn heavy.”

She laughs gently but takes pity on him and twists them so that he’s now pinned beneath her with a knee on either side of his hips. “Better?” she asks, slipping one hand into his.

“Yes,” he says easily through what he knows is a lopsided smirk. He brings his eyes to hers then and gently pushes her hair out of her face so he can really look at her. He wonders if he’ll ever not feel this way when he does – heart rate rapid, and safe when her hands are on him, always so safe. A little nervous, too, because to this day he still can’t quite believe that _this_ girl is the one looking at him like _that_ – like he’s her world, like she loves him.

It hits him then just how much of his life is tangled up in this _one_ person – all the firsts, the hopes and dreams, the infinite moments that belong to just them and no one else. The kid they share that’s quite literally, half him and half her.

There’s so much about her that’s hasn’t changed at all – the way her voice softens and folds around the syllables of his name, the green of her eyes, as clear and as honest as the day she handed him a Band-Aid on the playground for his scraped knee, the feel of her skin, soft to the touch, like butter, under his own.

There’s so much that’s different. She’s long lost the bit of baby fat that she once carried around her cheeks – her face is sharper now, her cheekbones more prominently defined. There’s a band of pale skin that encircles her fourth finger, a little less tanned than the rest of her hand; he’ll sometimes catch a glimpse of it when she removes her jewelry to wash the dishes. On the left side of her stomach, there’s a single, indented silver mark that always disappoints her when yet another jar of shea butter does nothing in the way of fading it. He loves that scar, though, and he secretly hopes stays forever because it’s actual proof of the downright amazing thing only she can do, proof of the amazing thing they created together.

Her body is a timeline of their life together, of every day of sunshine, of shadow, a chronology of the chapters of their story tucked away into every mark and scar – like an uncharted map waiting to be unrolled, waiting to be read and discovered.

“What?” she asks, the hint of a laugh dancing on the edge of her voice.

There are a thousand things he can say to her in this moment, and they’d all be the right things, too. _You’re beautiful. I hope I never stop earning that look you_ _’_ _re giving me now, never stop being the one on the other end of it. You, and the family you_ _’_ _ve given me, are the very best things about my life._

 _If there_ _’_ _s ever a world where I don_ _’_ _t get to love you every day - just like this - then I want no part of it_.

But tonight, he’s not sure if any of that truly captures the universe of what he really feels for her; so, he just shakes his head, gently tugs down the girl who will never not hold his entire heart, and kisses her with everything he has in him.  

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i realize that i have officially missed holiday season, like really just blown right past it, but i hope you enjoy it nonetheless! 
> 
> i'll try to have the second part up soon, and i also have another multi-chapter story in the works in their pre-kid years, so let me know if you're all interested in that!
> 
> also, if you haven't read epilogue: meet juliet - i hope you like her! and i hope you like this grown-up iteration of our faves, too. they're fun and a challenge to write for and imagine at this age, but i hope i've kept the spirit of them alive.
> 
> please let me know what you think - what's good, what's bad, all that jazz. 
> 
> thanks so much for reading!


	2. Chapter 2

He can’t feel his arms.

He hadn’t expected that he’d be able to for at least a week, but it’s still disappointing to realize that he’d been right. Rolling out of bed, he grabs his discarded shirt from the cold floor, groans when he shucks it on, and pads out to the kitchen.

“Hey, Merry Christmas!” Betty greets with a smile, almost bouncing on her toes as she turns to him. “How did you sleep?”

He knows it’s Christmas and he’s really been trying to curb his morning attitude recently, but he just can’t help his instinctive grunt at her questions boundless energy. He reaches bleary eyed and blindly for the coffee cup in her hands and takes a long, slow sip.

There’s a part of him that wishes he hadn’t started drinking coffee at the young age he did because he’s sure that the caffeine does absolutely nothing for him now, but at least the heat of the liquid over his tongue does something in the way of jolt starting his system.

“Thanks,” he says, passing the mug back to her. “How long have you been up? You could’ve woken me.” He slumps into one of the barstools and with great effort, pulls out the one next to him when Betty comes around the counter. She moves behind him instead, running her hands up and down his arms.

“Oh really, _I could’ve woken you_? What happened the last time I tried to wake you up?”

He had very, _very_ unintentionally waved her off _in his sleep_ – important to emphasize that –  and clocked her in the nose.

 _Then_ he had woken up because she started shrieking bloody murder. 

He throws her a sheepish smile over his shoulder. “Any bylines today?” he asks, reaching for the copy of the _New York Times_ strewn across the counter. They’re probably the only people in the building that still get the paper delivered – digital age, death of print journalism and all that – but he feels like it’s a necessary expense.

“Just a contributing reporting one. Page 5.” He flips and scans until he sees her name in all its ten-point font, italicized glory. “It’s nothing,” she says quickly. “You don’t need to cut this one out.”

“What, Betty Cooper-Jones contributing reporting on flight delays at JFK due to winter storm? I absolutely do.”

He hears her laugh behind him. “If you say so.” 

He brushes his finger over the small type of her name, wondering if he’ll ever not double-take at her double-barrel name. He hadn’t expected her to do anything at all with his last name, let alone add it to the end of hers, but then again, she often does exactly what he _doesn’t_ expect so he really shouldn’t have been all that surprised.

For as long as he’s known her, she’s been Betty Cooper. Betty Cooper the Achiever, Betty Cooper the pride of Riverdale, and he didn’t think that signing a piece of paper – an incredibly _unromantic_ piece of paper that looked remarkably like a new patient form at the dentist’s office – should change anything in the way of who she was. _Is._ He hadn’t wanted her to lose the power and success behind her name, the name she’d worked so hard her whole life to build – she’s Betty Cooper and she always has been; in his eyes, Betty Cooper can do anything.

Joneses on the other hand – Joneses have about a fifty percent high school drop-out rate.

But he had picked up the mail one day and had almost thrown out a letter he thought was for Mrs. Alexakis-Poulos, the little Greek lady who never did fully grasp the concept of mail forwarding, because she was the only one who got mail at his address and who had a double-barrel name.

At least, she _used_ to be because there it was staring back at him, the two names he knew so well, but never together, and never before side by side like that – _Cooper-Jones_. She had just shrugged and smiled shyly when he’d asked about it, asked her why she did it – they were a team, she’d said, they had been since they were sixteen and tracking down her pregnant sister, and it was high time the world knew it, too.

He’s not the type that cries when touched, he doesn’t really cry in general; there’d been some tears when Juliet was born, but he also chalks that unfortunate crying jag up to being awake for thirty-two hours straight and Betty telling him seriously and repeatedly that she was going to write to the president of Trojan herself to make sure that he got a lifetime’s supply of their products while she squeezed his hand to its breaking point.

But he thinks that if he were that type, the crying type, Betty tracing over the hyphen on her new license and telling him that she hoped she’d do _his_ name proud would probably have plain done him in.

And she had and she still does every day – make him proud. He has shoeboxes filled with newspaper clippings to prove it. He hasn’t missed anything with her byline in years, except the ones where the paper got delivered to the apartment below theirs, and he’s not about to miss this one either.

“Come on,” she says, giving his shoulders a double-squeeze and pulling him gently towards the direction of the couch. “Come sit with me.”

He follows her lead – his back is still hurting since he’s officially completing his metamorphosis into old age – and collapses on the couch next to her, holding his arm out for her to turn into him. He’s perfectly content to sit here with her and pass her cup of coffee back and forth, maybe fall back asleep until Juliet climbs up into their laps muttering about how the sun’s too bright, but Betty is chewing at her lip as she looks out the window indicating she has thoughts, plural, on her mind.

“What?” he asks, tapping at her shoulder. 

“Should we take a cab later?”

He shrugs against her. “It’s up to you.”

“It’s supposed to snow again later. But the subway’s probably not going to be that crowded, either, since it’s a holiday.” He nods, knowing that she’s not expecting him to say anything right now, at least not until she’s more thoroughly weighed all the options out loud. “I’m also wearing heels, tonight.”

 _Now’s the time_. “Let’s take a cab, then.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. My back still hurts so I can’t piggyback you when you decide to take off shoes and walk barefoot through the snow like a-”

“Okay, that happened _one_ time and-“

“Kidding, Betts.” She rolls her eyes and lets her head fall back against him just a little harder than necessary. “Let’s take a cab because I don’t want your beautiful, delicate feet to freeze in this abysmal weather we’re having. Better?”

“Much.”

“And also because I’m not getting on the subway again with another Barbie box and Archie and Ronnie got her that Jeep.”

“Do you think she’ll wake up soon?”

“Juliet? Probably not, it’s only-” he tips his head up, the clock on the stove just barely visible. “Nine. She woke up at eleven-thirty yesterday.” _Like some kind of heathen_ , he thinks, but he keeps that part to himself.

Betty sighs, just barely, and he watches her eyes swing from the piles of wrapped presents under the tree to the direction of Juliet’s room and then back again. He catches on – she may be older and there may be an actual kid running around the house now, but Betty Cooper has _Christmas Spirit_ meaning that her hands are still twitching and itching to open her presents.

“Here,” he says, pulling his arm out from under her shoulders and reaching for a flat, nondescript gift. “Open it. I know you want to.”

“We should probably just wait for Juliet,” she says unconvincingly, flipping and turning the package over in her hands. “I really don’t think she can sleep for that-“

“Betts,” he interrupts. “Just open it. I’ve been waiting to give you this since your birthday. She won’t get this one, anyhow.”

It’s all the prodding she needs. “I told you, I don’t need another copy of the _Kama Sutra_ ,” she quips while tearing at the paper, voice dancing with the mirth of her own joke. He’s tempted to laugh, but he’s more interested in her reaction so he watches her instead, smiling when her eyes soften at the realization of what he’s gotten her.

“Oh, Jug.” Her voice is so soft, a whisper that he can barely hear, and slightly wet, slightly cracked.

“Merry Christmas, Betts.”

It’s taken him fifteen years to both find the book _and_ actually have the money to buy it. He’s been able to find the others at more or less reasonable prices over the years. This particular one though, had been miles more expensive and infinitely harder to track down than the rest.

He almost bought it for her about four years ago with the money he had gotten from a particularly lengthy and surprisingly successful expose he penned for _The Atlantic_ – successful largely due to Archie and his legions of Twitter followers that click anything he links with blind devotion. Ultimately, though, the book had seemed like a frivolous expense next to their sudden need for prenatal vitamins, cribs, and diaper genies so his nest egg had fittingly gone towards the Baby Jogger Stroller 2000 instead.

When he had gotten his book advance, admittedly small but more than enough to buy the book with good chunk of change leftover, too, he had cashed it and taken it straight to an eBay bidding war. And won – take that _icollectthangs259._  

“You didn’t have to do this,” she murmurs.

“Yes, I did. I was going to give it to you for your birthday, but Christmas seemed...right.”

She glances at him then and he knows that they’re both somewhere else, about fifteen years in the past somewhere else, if he’s being exact.

“I can’t believe that we’re done,” she says, glancing over to the shelf where she’s stacked the others proudly on display.

“Yeah, well, it took me longer than it should have.”

“No, Jug.” Her voice is powerful when it cuts in. “It took you just long enough.”

They’re not poor, at least not in the I don’t know where my next meal is coming from, I hope Pop has sympathy on me kind of _poor_ he had known back in Riverdale. They’re fine – they do just fine for themselves; with Betty’s recently-upped salary – thank you _New York Times_ – and his hopefully steady and sizable flow of book royalties in a few months, he thinks that they might be able loosen their hold on penny jar sometime soon, too.

But still, none of the books had been especially cheap. They were definitely never a necessary expense in the way that it was just necessary for them to pay rent, necessary him to fork over his entire paycheck for the only brand of strained peas that didn’t make Juliet spit up all over her plastic high-chair tray. The books were an after expense – an after all the bills, after rent, after all the Juliet food-clothes-toys, expense.

But they were an expense that inherently meant that they were doing okay, they were doing even _better_ than okay, that they were fighting the good fight and somehow, against all odds, coming out on top.

She wouldn’t want them, anyway, if they weren’t.

But she loves it, he can tell, from the way she’s cradling the book like it’s a stick of dynamite, from the way she’s brushing her hands over the worn pages. “How did I not find this lying around if you’ve had it since my birthday?” she asks quietly.

“A master never reveals his secrets.”

She’s lost in thought for a moment, then, “It was at Arch and V’s, wasn’t it?”

He pauses, caught. “Yeah.”

“Knew it.” She looks so pleased with herself. “I’m going to miss getting these.”

“If you have another favorite writer, I’ll gladly start the hunt again.”

“I do,” she says easily, tucking her cold feet under his legs. “But I hear that I’m getting at least two hundred copies of his book delivered to my doorstep next July when it finally gets published, so I don’t think you’ll have much looking to do.”

He smiles. He doesn’t think she’s ever missed an opportunity to build him up, so he should’ve seen that one coming a mile away. 

“Jug?”

“Hmm?”

“Thanks for the book. For all of them.”

She kisses him then, her hand spread wide over his cheek pulling him to her, tasting like coffee and something sweet that he can’t exactly place; he thinks, though, that it might be sugar cookies. His mind loses the musing when she twists her body to line up with his, starts gently teasing his mouth open with hers, and he’s about to push her back against the couch, his hand cradling the back of her head to keep her from knocking into the armrest when-

“Ew.”

Betty jerks away from him, jumping back a full arm’s length so quickly that he thinks he might’ve actually seen a spit chain form and break between them.

“Hey Juju!” she says so brightly it almost makes him want to rub at his ears at the pitch change. “Merry Christmas!”

She’s cranky, no surprise, and maybe even crankier than usual at having caught the kiss.

But, he thinks he hears her mumble back some form of _Merry Christmas_ as she’s climbing onto the couch, leaning her head against Betty’s shoulder, and dropping her snowman-socked feet into his lap.

“Did you sleep well?” Betty asks, gently tugging at a knot in Juliet’s hair. He doesn’t know why, but it makes him feel just a little better when she swats Betty’s hand away the same way she had done his – he knows it’s never personal when it comes to Juliet and anyone coming close to her hair, but it’s nice to see it confirmed.

“It was okay.” Her eyes swing from the discarded wrapping paper on the floor and the book next to Betty and her tone quickly turns accusatory. “You opened them without me?”

“Of course not, Ju,” Betty starts, looking for a way around the contrary evidence.

“This was just a special present,” he adds quickly. “I forgot to give it to Mom on her birthday so I thought it was only fair that she opens this one first.” It’s not the best excuse, but it’ll do.

“Oh. Okay,” she concedes, tone ticking back up. “Can I see?”

“Sure.”

He watches as her stubby fingers close around the book, turning and flipping it over in her hands. “What’s it called?”

“It’s called,” Betty says, running her finger under each word as she reads. “ _The Bluest Eye_.” 

Juliet can’t read yet, but they’re doing just about everything they can to get her there– stories every night, subtitles on every inane after-school special she watches, alphabet magnets on the fridge that Archie likes to turn into dirty words when the kid’s not looking.

“That’s Dad’s name,” she says, pointing to the yellow sticky-note he’d fixed onto the book’s cover.

“Hey, well done, Juju,” he says, patting her toes.

“What’s the rest say?”

Betty is smiling as she reads and sliding her finger under the words. _“The Bluest Eye for my beloved with the greenest eyes. Love, Jug.”_

“What’s it mean?”

“It means that we’re really lucky to have a guy as sweet as Dad around in our lives.”

He smiles at the compliment. He thinks that the significance must’ve gone way over Juliet’s head, but it’s not lost on him.

“Did my hat help?” she asks suddenly, feeling at her bare head. He’s surprised it’s taken her this long to bring it up but he has no idea what she’s talking about. _Help what_ , he mouths to Betty.

“It did, Ju,” she supplies seamlessly. “Dad wanted to thank you himself because your hat helped so much with his secret mission.”

“It did?”

“Mmm hmm,” he adds. “I wouldn’t have been able to complete the secret mission without it.” He tries to keep his voice as steady as possible through the words _secret mission_ , words he’s not sure he’s ever said adjacent to each other before.

“That’s good,” Juliet confirms, stretching out an arm. “Do you still need it?”

The _yes, yes I do_ is on the tip of his tongue because he’s straight up missed his hat.

“Nope,” he says. “But thanks for letting me borrow it, Ju.”

“Welcome,” she says earnestly. He can’t count the number of times they’ve both corrected her, telling her gently that ‘you’re’ should come before ‘welcome,’ but he decides to let it slide now; she’ll clue onto it soon and he knows he’ll miss this particularly endearing mistake when she does.

“Can we open presents now?”

“Yeah, but hey,” he warns. “Everyone takes turns, okay? First you, then mom.”

“And then you,” she finishes.

He had in no way deliberately left himself out. He had in no way been testing her to see if she remembered him. He had legitimately and honestly just plain forgotten to include himself in the present-opening go-around, and there’s a very large part of him now that wants to gather up the kid who would likely squirm and wriggle her way out any hug he’d try to give and never let go.

But her hands are already tearing at the wrapping paper and she’s so excited, her eyes are so bright – he’s not about to interrupt this moment for her.

“Thank you,” she calls over her shoulder in an afterthought, box half unearthed.

“Honey, Santa brought that for you,” Betty corrects.

“I know. Thanks for letting him in when he knocked.”

 

* * *

 

Much to the chagrin of what he thinks must be the only child in New York who prefers the subway over door to door service, he flags a cab down later that evening and gestures for Betty and Juliet to join him from the lobby as the car pulls to a stop in front of him. Juliet doesn’t look all that pleased with him when he buckles her in – he figures it has something about her wanting to play in the snow and him saying no because she’s wearing felt slippers and he’s not about to make a trip to the emergency room when her toes succumb to inevitable frostbite – but she’s over it by the time they hit Midtown when she scrambles on his lap to get a better look at the lights.

“Best behavior tonight, okay?” he says to her when Archie and Veronica’s building comes into view.

“Okay.” Her grin back at her is toothy and mischievous like she’s thinking about disregarding him as soon as she’s one foot out the cab, but given the way she loiters while walking through marble lobby, her hand just slightly tugging his back towards the door, he gathers that she’s more than a little nervous at being so out of her element.

He feels for her. There isn’t much occasion in their lives for formal dress – it’s not like he needs a tux to take her zoo or the library on weekends – and Juliet’s first reaction to him and the dress shirt Veronica demanded that he wear was _“_ _you look weird, Dad._ _”_ It’s a bit Pavlovian, he thinks – he really only wears dress shirts and things with collars for events like these, and they always come hand-in-hand with the very high standard of _“_ _best behavior, Juliet,_ _”_ and hours of her sitting uncomfortably with the grown-ups around the dinner table on a stack of throw pillows.

It doesn’t help that she’s slightly apprehensive of Veronica. He’s pretty sure that Juliet likes her, but Veronica is prone to talking loudly and decisively in a way that Betty never does, and he thinks that it sometimes scares her a little; hell, it sometimes still scares him a little. Case in point – his double-rap on the door is followed by Veronica’s voice beyond it screaming “ _I_ _’_ _ll get it, Archie_ sit _down, I said I_ _’_ _ll get it_ ;” Juliet shifts closer to his side and he’s instantly on edge.

“Juju, it’s okay,” he hears Betty say to her quietly as the door opens slowly to reveal Veronica’s floating, perfectly coiffed head.

“Greetings!” she says stiffly, and he knows immediately something is wrong. One, because Veronica has never used the word _greetings_ to greet them before – ever, and two, because her smile a little too wide and a little too pained.

“What’s up with you?” Veronica doesn’t beat around the bush, so he sees no point in doing so either.

“Before you flip and get moody, Jughead,” she says, shooting him a glare that he doesn’t even know what he’s done to deserve. “Just remember that this isn’t my fault.”

“Veronica, what-”

“Both your parents are here.”

Before he even gets a chance to hiss back a “ _what-no-we_ _’_ _re leaving_ ,” Veronica throws the door open with a loud, very cheery, very fake “guess who finally made it!”

His dad, Alice Cooper, and Fred Andrews – because why the hell not –all stare back at back at him with winning smiles. Archie looks sheepish in the corner and he knows immediately that this already exhausting family reunion had been his brainchild, though probably unintentionally.

Next to him, Betty tenses and her hands clench just a little tighter on Juliet’s shoulders. He holds back a sigh on her behalf but he knows exactly what she’s thinking. That she’s wearing her hair down tonight and if she’d known about this, she wouldn’t have because her mother will comment on how it makes her face look too full. That she hadn’t actually wanted Juliet to wear her felt slippers tonight either, because she too is _‘aware that it’s snowing outside, Mom,’_ but Juliet had almost thrown a tantrum when they’d brought out her boots, and that would’ve made them egregiously late.

He wants to leave, he wants to tiptoe and slink right back down the hall and pretend that he hasn’t been seen yet. But he doesn’t think that’s a particularly mature thing to do or an especially good example to set, so he places a hand on both their backs and nudges them gently into the apartment with as merry a _“Merry Christmas”_ he can muster.

His hand gently guiding Betty into the apartment is about all it takes to break her refractory period. She shakes her head quickly, drops the platter of cookies in Archie’s waiting hands, and greets her mother with a polite hug, and high-pitched “Mom, what a nice surprise! Juliet, come say hi to your grandparents.”

Alice and his dad turn their attention to Juliet first, and he reminds himself to buy the kid an ice-cream cone or hot chocolate when he next gets the chance because it gives him the time to adjust to it all, and he desperately needs the buffer. Facing his is dad is one thing, but facing his dad and his _mother in law_ on Christmas with no preparation whatsoever is an entirely different beast.

Standing from his crouch-to-hug-the-kid position, his dad sucks in a breath and holds his arms open to him. “Jughead,” he booms, and even though FP’s voice is loud, he notes that it doesn’t have the same tell-tale slur he’s become an expert at teasing out within the span of a few words. “You look good. How are the Joneses?”

“Keeping up, Dad.” He returns the slaps his father gives him on his back, trying not to betray the fact that they sting just a little. His father has, physically at least, always been the bigger man and the stronger one, too, but he’s not about to admit that fact in front of this whole motley crew.

“Jughead,” Alice greets politely, hands folded in front of her. They don’t hug and that is more than fine with him. Preferable, even. “You’re looking well. Juliet’s hair seems to be getting lighter.”

He holds back a scoff. “If you say so, Mrs. C.”

Apparently, it’s all his fault that Juliet doesn’t have blonde hair.

Technically and scientifically speaking, he knows that it actually is. But it wasn’t as though he had been actively trying to sabotage the proud and pristine line of flaxen-haired Coopers. It’s a comment he’s thought about making every time the topic how much prettier Juliet would be as a blonde has come up – that Alice Cooper should just be thankful that Juliet doesn’t look quite like her _other_ two grandchildren, better known as the second coming of Cheryl and Jason Blossom because it could’ve been a possibility with red hair skipping generations and whatnot, but he knows bringing up that particular touchy subject of family history won’t curry him any favor whatsoever.

So he nods and bites his tongue about the whole thing. It’s easier that way, and he’s resolved to not engage in this particular conversation piece unless Alice Cooper actually broaches the topic with Juliet herself because that to him is unacceptable.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Veronica swish back into the room he hadn’t been aware she’d exited. “Dinner is ready,” she calls loudly, cutting through all the pleasantries. “So we can all move to the dining room.”

In front of him, Juliet jumps at the volume of Veronica’s voice, and he really does feel horrible that his hand on her shoulder is about all he can do to comfort her in this moment. He wishes fleetingly that she didn’t have to be the only child present in a sea of adults – not that he’s ready to remedy that situation for her anytime soon because she’s a handful enough as it is – but at least at Thanksgiving or Easter with the Coopers, she often has her very bright-haired cousins present there with her in solidarity, despite the vast age difference.

On Juliet’s shoulder, Betty’s hand brushes his gently and he moves his off. She’ll take over now, he intuits, she’ll make sure Juliet’s food is cut into bite-sized pieces, she’ll grab her a dinner roll if she sees her eyeing them but is too shy to ask.

“Thanks,” he says to her quietly. He doesn’t mind being the one on Juliet dinner-duty, but he thinks that Betty just might want the distraction tonight.

He lingers towards the end of the pack herding into the dining room, catching the hostess on the way. In all honesty, he’s impressed with how she’s handling this so far – Veronica likes plans and she especially likes RSVPs, and he’s pretty sure that she’s just spent the past hour rearranging place settings and moving her perfectly timed schedule up an hour or so because they’ve just skipped cocktails altogether and Veronica skips cocktail hour for no one.

That is, no one except best friend Betty Cooper when her mother shows up unannounced.

“Thanks for the warning, Ronnie,” he says, because impressed as he is, he still gets a kick out of giving her a hard time.

Which she often sees right through. “Don’t be so dramatic, Jughead. I didn’t know about this either. Besides, don’t you think Alice and FP look lovely together tonight?” She’s got one of those perfectly sweet, menacing smiles on her face simply daring him to challenge her, and he sends her back a grimace that says plainly, _no. No, he does not think_. 

He’s aware that there’s some kind of shared _history_ between his dad and Betty’s mom because the fates thought that growing up in the murder town was just not enough trauma in his young life, but he doesn’t want to know the sordid details of what went down there. Just the fact that _something_ had happened is really more than enough and any references to the apple not falling far from the tree frankly make his stomach turn.

“Tell me again why your parents aren’t here to complete this Christmas miracle we’ve all been blessed with?” he asks.

“I sent them to Majorca, of course. My Christmas present to them. And to Archiekins.” she says. _Of course_ , as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

 

* * *

 

The evening is really not going as badly as he thought it would. He had been seated next to Betty and Archie’s dad at dinner, and apart from a few choice questions thrown at him from Alice across the table about when his book would _finally_ be published and if they’ve been giving Juliet the organic vitamins she sent in the mail, it had all been fine. He had even been able to give relatively short and pain-free answers – “ _next July, I’ll be sure to send you a copy,”_ and _“of course, Mrs. Cooper, every day.”_  

The latter had been a lie that had Betty hiding a laugh behind a cough, because Alice Cooper had sent vitamins that were the size of his thumb. When Juliet had nearly choked on one he managed to snap in _half_ , he had promptly thrown out the entire bottle and they’d all happily gone back to the Flintstones gummy chews that Alice insisted were _all sugar, zero vitamins_.

Now, he’s sitting on one of Veronica’s many beige chairs in her all beige apartment watching the scene in front of him unfold. Fred Andrews is asleep with his mouth open, Juliet is regaling FP and Alice with her long list of Christmas presents, and Betty and Veronica are turned towards each other, laughing quietly while sipping wine.

“Hey,” Archie interjects, holding out a beer and a cookie. _The olive branch_. “So, uh, sorry about... this.”

“Let me guess,” he says, moving over on the loveseat. “You invited your dad who invited my dad who invited Betty’s mom.”

“Actually, my dad invited Betty’s mom who invited FP.”

“An unexpected twist,” he nods, taking a sip of the beer. He has never really been much for drinking – he figures that has everything to do with watching his dad alienate almost everyone in his life the further down the rum-filled rabbit hole he went.

But Archie’s been on some kind of craft beer kick recently and _so_ eager to share his bougie finds with anyone half willing to drink, and Veronica is, shocker to no one, not a beer person. As beers go though, this one is nowhere near as bad as the pumpkin-cranberry-maple sour he had been subjected to about a month ago, which tasted like Thanksgiving and a candle all at once.

“It’s cool, Archie, really,” he assures again. “Juliet looks happy. And you should see your Dad on Christmas.” Hell, _he_ probably should see his own dad on Christmas, too.

Archie takes a sip of his own beer and pulls a face that Jughead reads as _huh, better than I expected_.

“So, you found the Dream House.”

He snorts. “After seven hours, yes, I found the Dream House.”

“Did she like it?”

“Initially,” he says. “The My Little Mechanic playset is the clear winner though.”

Archie laughs, and he thinks that if it’s possible for a laugh to sound as American-As-Apple-Pie, Archie’s would be it. “I mean, she is Betty’s kid,” he says. “It makes sense. You did a good thing though, Jug.”

Deep down, he knows that Archie is right – he did the right thing. He thinks. But he can’t help but be a little disappointed that the allure of the giant Dream House had been so diminished once the Little Mechanic playset had been opened, pushed off into a corner to make way for the little tool kit and gas pumps. He knows Juliet’s snub had been in no way intentional – if anyone, she was snubbing the pot-bellied do-gooder eating his way to diabetes one plate of cookies at a time – but that in no way curbed his disappointment.

But, he reminds himself, _it’s not about him._

“So,” he says, instead. “What did Veronica end up getting you?”

Archie shrugs. “A bunch of stuff. She got me a beer tasting at some brewery in Brooklyn that’s pretty cool though. Wanna go?”

He knows all about the beer tasting because it had been his idea, but he still tries to give the best _I’m-impressed-how-hip-and-trendy-your-wife-is_ face he can. “Sure,” he says easily. “Just pick a day.”

Archie looks around the room and leans in closer, speaking softly and hurriedly. “She also got me this couples massage.”

“Let’s just see how the beer tasting goes first.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Archie corrects quickly, face starting to give the color of his hair a run for its money. “She wants us to go together because it’s a bonding experience or something. But –” he looks around the room again before leaning in even further. “Do you think I have to be, like, _naked_ for it?”

He wants desperately to laugh for many reasons, the primary one being that for Archie and Veronica, “naked” isn’t exactly an unfamiliar or uncomfortable state, the secondary one being that despite the decades their friendship has spanned, Archie still hasn’t grown out of the deer-in-the-headlights look he gets when he’s nervous about something.

But Jughead doesn’t laugh. Instead he composes himself, takes another sip of his beer, and says to his friend as seriously as he can, “I think it’s a strong possibility.”

 

* * *

  

When he returns from tucking Juliet into the beige guest bedroom, feeling the weight of Alice Cooper’s eyes on him with every step because he just _knows_ she has something to say about the way he’s carrying his own kid and how he’s doing it wrong, his father is sitting where Archie had been, staring hard at the lime wedge floating in his seltzer.

“Dad,” he greets, joining him slowly and reaching for his beer bottle on the table. It’s empty now, but he feels like this is about to be the kind of conversation where he’s going to want something – anything – to distract himself with. “Didn’t expect to see you here tonight.”

FP nods slowly, not meeting his eyes. “Ali- Betty’s mom said it was okay. Sorry for intruding.”

“You’re not,” he offers back. “I was just... surprised.” Understatement, but it’s fitting for a conversation with his father.  

“Kid tire herself out talking?”

“Could be. She also sleeps more than any normal kid does so don’t take it personally.”

“Gets that from you. You slept through anything when you were that age.” He’s surprised his dad remembers that detail about him or any at all of him at _that age_. His mom had always beat into him the fact that FP had been more or less gone with the wind up until JB had been born, and after that, he’d been gone with a light breeze. He doesn’t know if he believes his dad right now, but he wants to, though, he realizes.

Since Juliet, he’s understood his father both more and less than he used to. He gets now why FP had kept him in the dark about so much – about the Serpents, about their family – because he really does get the whole protect-your-kids mentality he only understood in some high-brow theoretical sense before. But as the father of a daughter, he also can’t wrap his head the fact that he let his mother walk out of both their lives with JB in tow, how he didn’t fight harder to get her back, how he had let it get to that stage in the first place.

He wants to believe the man, but it’s hard to when he can’t fully understand him.

“You happy?” he hears FP asking him.

“Yeah, Dad,” he says. “I am. How could I not be?”

FP seems to take this in slowly, his whole upper body nodding and rocking along in agreement. He looks at his father then, his tired eyes and heavy shoulders revealing the fact that unlike him, he may not be. It’s an unsettling truth to come face to face with on today of all days, and he suddenly feels the need to reach out to the man who likely spent the majority of the day alone in a tin can with only the sound of the TV for company.

“You have a pretty great kid there.”

“The best,” he says simply.

“I know I didn’t always do right by you. There’s a lot of crap I should have protected you from. There’s a lot of crap I shouldn’t have done and probably more I should’ve done.” Jughead almost nods but catches himself before he does; it’s not the time or place. “You’re good with her,” his dad says, jutting a chin in the direction of the guest bedroom. “You don’t get that from me, or even your mom. But you are.”

In his heart of hearts, he knows the only opinion that really matters on how great or lousy a job he’s doing at this whole _parenthood_ thing is from the girl sleeping face-down, possibly snoring in Veronica’s guest bedroom. But that doesn’t stop the feeling of some metaphorical weight he didn’t know he’d been carrying falling away from his shoulders, and for that he nods at his dad gratefully.

“You did the best you could,” he offers eventually. “That’s all I could have asked for.”

And it is – all he could ask and hope for from his father was his best. All he can do now with Juliet is his best. His very, very best. He doesn’t know if FP had really done his best with him or JB, and he’s tempted to say, _no_ , he really hadn’t, but it’s not something he wants to unpack right now. He doesn’t know his father, not really, and he doesn’t know his father’s mind. But what he does know is that FP’s best is not good enough for Juliet, not even close, and that as Juliet’s father, he needs to work every day to do better than his own father’s best.

But it’s Christmas and Veronica’s meticulously planned dinner-party is not the place to rehash ancient history.

They sit for a few more minutes, and as FP moves to leave he hears himself blurting out, “you should stick around. If you can. JB’s coming to visit in a few days. Something about missing the East Coast cold out in California.”

He’s about to offer up his apartment, too, but FP shakes his head slowly, somewhat sadly. “I have some things to do back home.”

He’s learned to not ask anymore. He doesn’t know exactly where his dad stands with the Serpents, or even where the Serpents stand in Riverdale, but he’s been out of loop for a while now and he knows it needs to stay that way for his family.

“If you change your mind,” he presses softly. “Pink futon’s yours.”

When his dad smiles at him, he finds himself smiling, too.  

  

* * *

 

They take Veronica up on her offer to let them use her driver; on principle, he’s opposed to this sort of thing - he thinks it breeds a certain sort of entitlement and he doesn’t want Juliet to stop being the kid who prefers the grimy subway to a chauffeured limo. But, he figures that this isn’t the hill to die on tonight because Juliet is still sleeping soundly against him and blowing spit bubbles on his suit jacket.

While Betty slips off her shoes with an audible sigh, he settles against the soft leather of the town car, shifting Juliet to one shoulder so that Betty can claim the other. He feels like he can’t so much as sneeze right now or take any breaths more than half his lung capacity, the weight of his kid and her mother on heavy on either side of him.

But, it’s unquestionably his favorite moment of the evening.

“Happy?” he asks quietly, his eyes tracing the ghost of a smile on her lips.

He feels rather than hears her contented hum against him, the rumble of the car’s engine loud in the quiet of the night.

“Are you?”

“I always am, Betts.”

And he is. He means every word. There’s a difference, he’s realized long ago, between happiness and difficulty, one that he hadn’t fully understood until he had enough time to live out what each truly meant. His life is not easy; he had always known that his chosen career path – picking up articles where and when he can, revising his book until he had wanted to just burn the damn thing and call it a day – would never have them living the life that someone like Veronica leads, and that’s _hard_.

It’s hard to sit down with the bills every month with a calculator, a headache, and a worried wife, it’s hard to figure out what he can cut out of his life so that Juliet doesn’t have to cut anything out of hers.

It’s hard to evade and duck around Juliet’s questions about his past, it’s hard have to explain to her that his tattoo that she thinks is _cool, Dad!_ , is actually the furthest thing from _cool_ that he can imagine, and it’s _so hard_ to have to crouch down to meet her eye level, gently smudge off the wobbly _S_ she’s drawn on her arm in green magic marker, and tell her this is one of the ways she shouldn’t – she _can’t_ – be like him.

Being the weird kid, the homeless kid, the poor kid, he’s always known that life is just goddamn hard.

But there’s also happiness in the hardship, and he hadn’t really known that was something that could exist until he was more or less hit in the face with it. 

There’s happiness that comes from watching Juliet’s baby-toothed grin spread across her face when he comes home with an Easy Bake Oven because she wants to be _‘just like mom,’_ even if that means he’ll have to wait until next month to fix the movie projector because the cat knocked it over. There’s happiness that comes from seeing Betty’s still shy smile and red cheeks when she comes home to find flowers ‘just because’ or a new book that he thinks she’ll like, even if that means there’s no casual pit-stop at Shake Shack for him when he meets with his editor uptown later that week.

There’s happiness – there is so, so much happiness – that comes from having the two most important people in his life, the two people define his entire world, lean heavily against him on the way home; there’s happiness that comes from the fact that they trust _him_ to protect them, to love them even through all the hard that life might throw at him.

Life is hard, and he expects that it always will be. But there isn’t a day that goes by that he isn’t happy.

 

* * *

  

“Penny for your thoughts,” Betty whispers against his neck.

“That you’re beautiful.”

He feels her smile on his skin, the murmur of her soft, happy little sigh. “What are you really thinking about?”

He’s never gotten one past her and he doesn’t suppose he ever will. “You made a good call on the mechanic playset,” he says eventually, vision growing fuzzy from watching the blur of the cars moving next to and past them. “She loves it. I’m glad we got it.” 

“Jug, she loves that doll house, you know that, right?”

“I know,” he says quickly, even though he’s not really sure he does.

But she had wanted it, she had asked for it, she had lamented the fact that she had been one of the only kids without it, and he had found it. It was there for her to do with it as she pleased, and he tells himself that’s all that matters. That she’s not without, that she had come out of this day excited and happy, feeling lucky, feeling fulfilled.

“You know, when we were kids,” Betty whispers to him, voice faraway and so near all at once. “Polly and I used to have this huge white Victorian doll house we’d spend hours playing with.”

“The one in the basement left corner?”

“Mmm hmm. Polly would come up with all these stories about these perfect girls who’d always be the captains of the River Vixens; they’d have these perfect boyfriends, these perfect cars, these perfect lives – I remember she used to get so frustrated with me when we’d play.”

“Why?” he asks. “What would you come up with?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugs against him. “Different things. But my stories were never the same as hers and that’s why I think she didn’t like playing with me.”

Betty pauses when Juliet stirs on his shoulder, mumbling something incomprehensible, and smooths a hand over her hair, lulling her back to sleep.

“Sometimes,” she continues in an even softer whisper. “I think those stories were all the things Polly and I wanted in life, you know, for ourselves.”

“So you must’ve come up with countless stories about a writer with a ferocious appetite and a propensity to spend a whole day brooding in a corner by himself, then.”

“Day in and day out,” she throws back easily, and even though he knows she’s joking, it makes him smile. “But that’s my point – we’d make up all these stories about moms being best friends with their daughters, and kids with closets full of black ripped jeans instead of pastel cardigans because those were things we _wanted_ , those were the things we didn’t have.”

He sees her through-line, then, and he hopes with everything in him, hopes with every fiber of his being, that above all else, she’s right about this.

“Maybe Juliet’s just not that interested in the Dream House because she has everything she could possibly want.” 

 

* * *

  

By the time they pull up to their building, Betty is asleep on him too, and when he shakes her awake he’s only able to get her about halfway there; it’s enough, though, for her to groggily slip her shoes back on her feet, which is a good thing because he has no idea how the many straps of her shoes crisscross together, or how to help her with them.

Her eyes are still only half open when he leads her up the stairs, balancing behind him unsteadily in her heels, still only half open while she leans against him as he pushes the front door open with his foot and gently tugs her inside. He doesn’t know exactly what has done his family in tonight, maybe it has something to do with turkey and tryptophan, but he had always thought that was just junk science because it had never affected him.

He’s more willing to believe it now.

“Go to bed, Betts.” He gives her hand a squeeze and guides it in the direction of their room. “I’ll be in after I put her down.”

He knows that she really must be overwhelmingly tired because he had expected her to insist on tucking Juliet in with him, but she just kisses Juliet on the cheek, murmuring words of the love and sweet dreams variety, words she makes sure to say to her every night, without fail, regardless of the hour.

“Thanks, Juggie,” she whispers, her face disappearing behind their door and missing his smile.

It’s rarely _Juggie_ anymore, it’s always _Jug_ or on the rare occasion, _I’m so angry with you, Jughead, you don’t even know._ He misses it, he thinks as he pushes the door to Juliet’s room open with his foot. It sounds familiar, it instantly pulls him back to memories he didn’t know he still had of them, it reminds him of how far they’ve come.

Juliet’s room is a minefield of new toys dotting the floor, but he’s still able to make it to her bed without inadvertently catching on something and starting her awake. She lets him remove her shoes without complaint, but when he tries to wriggle off her little cardigan she waves one arm wildly, whining a muffled but audible _“stop, Dad,”_ into her pillow.

She’s not going to sleep comfortably in her stiff party dress and it’s likely going to lead to an attitude of unprecedented proportions in the morning, but he figures he’ll deal with that rickety bridge then.

He sits on the edge of her bed and only at the very end, watching her steady breaths, feeling his own line up with hers. He hopes that Betty is right. He hopes that this tiny room filled with toys that she’ll outgrow by next Christmas, that the promise that she can be anything and everything she wants to be with nothing short of his full support behind her, that the unyielding fact that she will always have his unconditional love, no questions asked – he hopes that it’s all enough, that it’s all she’s ever wanted for.

When she stirs - eyelashes fluttering against her skin and fingertips twitching - he kisses her forehead gently and steps away quickly, quietly, willing her to stay asleep, to stay dreaming. Her voice follows him, though, soft but sure, and determinedly driving straight to his heart.

“Thanks for the dream house, Dad.”

He stops his slow creep out of her room immediately and turns back to her, looking for any indication that he might’ve misheard or made up the line in his head because he’s exhausted and he sometimes does that. But she’s still sleeping exactly how he’d left her, breathing slowly, no indication that she’d just voiced anything at all.

In his heart, though, he knows she’d said it, the echo of her words silent and so loud all at once, like the remnants of a melody vibrating and rumbling long after the final chord. 

Shifting his weight from one foot to the other to stop the floorboard from creaking, he wonders if she had mischievously been peeking around her door when he came home with the toy the night before, or if she had overheard and internalized his and Betty’s whispers during the car ride home.

He wonders if she’s talking about something else entirely.

But whatever she means, it’s enough for him – it’s more than enough, and more than he’d ever hoped for – to hear those words said with such quiet conviction that he knows without a shadow of a doubt she means them with all her heart.

“Welcome, Juju,” he whispers back.

He shuts the door to her room as quietly as he can but leaves the one to the master ajar, just in case she might need him if her dreams are anything less than perfectly sweet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you enjoyed this little, very belated holiday story of mine! 
> 
> thank you so, so much for your thoughtful comments on the last chapter - really, they kept me going and inspired me to write this one. i would love to know your thoughts on this!
> 
> if you're interested, keep an eye out for my multi-chapter fic coming soon! thank you all for reading!


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